Crispin would have been delighted to do so, but he had just looked at his watch and it had told him that he had no time for idle dalliance. Her conversation enthralled him, but the claims of a to-be-caught train are paramount.
‘I wish I could,’ he said, ‘but I am afraid I must be going, or I shall miss my train.’
‘Oh well, I shall be seeing the joint tomorrow.’
‘Yes, and I hope you will be very happy there.’
‘You bet. And talking of betting, if you have a moment to spare before you go, can you direct me to a good bookie? I’ve had a hot tip on a horse, and I don’t know who to go to over here. Ever hear of a place called Newmarket?’
Crispin was conscious of a nostalgic pang. The name brought back memories of his youth. He had probably lost more money at Newmarket than anywhere.
That’s where it’s running a few days from now. So who do I do business with?’
‘I used to have an account with Slingsby’s. I still have, I imagine.’
‘Don’t you do any betting nowadays?’
‘Never. I have given it up completely.’
‘I guess you’re wise. I don’t often have anything on myself, but the fellow I was talking to said Brotherly Love would win going away.’
‘Brotherly Love?’
That’s its name. What’s yours, by the way, apart from the Scrope end?’
‘Crispin.’
‘For heaven’s sake! Not that I’m one to cast the first stone. They christened me Bernadette. Fortunately everyone calls me Barney. You must, too.’
‘I will indeed.’
‘Can you imagine anyone calling anyone Bernadette? Or Crispin for that matter, or even Willoughby. Nice fellow, Bill. My brother and I are his house guests.’
‘So he told me.’
‘A bit overweight, isn’t he?’
‘A little, perhaps.’
‘My late husband got that way.
‘Indeed?’
‘Couldn’t keep him off the starchy foods. But didn’t you say you had a train to catch?’
When Willoughby returned from his conference, expecting to see an elder brother, he was momentarily taken aback at finding a changeling in his office.
‘Why, hullo, Barney,’ he said. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘Out of the everywhere into here, Bill. I’ve just had a pleasant visit with Crispin. What a name! I think I’ll call him Crippen.’
‘What became of him?’
‘He had to make a train.’
‘Of course, yes, he told me. And what brings you here?’
‘I came to borrow a dollar or two. I’m cleaned out.’
‘Shopping?’
‘And contributing to the support of London’s hard-up citizens. There’s something about me that seemed to draw the panhandlers the way catnip attracts cats, and I’m down to my last dime. If you don’t give me of your plenty, I’ll have to skip lunch. Good for the figure, of course, but not a pleasant prospect.’
‘My dear Barney, of course you’ll lunch with me.
The needy never turned from your door, eh?’
‘You won’t mind my nephew being there?’
‘I won’t mind a horror from outer space being there if there’s lots to eat and drink’
There will be. This is a celebration. I’ve just bought The Girl in Blue.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘She is a miniature by Gainsborough. She is wearing a blue dress, so the late Gainsborough, hunting around for a title, called her The Girl in Blue.’
‘Very clever of him. Think like lightning, these artists. Where are we lunching? Excuse me bringing the subject up, but I’m starving.’
The Savoy.’
‘Shall we be going before I swoon?’
‘I’m ready. Off to lunch, Mabel,’ said Willoughby as they passed through the waiting-room.
‘Bon appétit, Mr Scrope.’
‘Good God! French and everything.’
‘And if anybody wants him,’ said Barney, ‘say he’s tied up in an orgy and it’s no use them waiting, as he doesn’t expect to sober up for months and months and months. It’s a celebration. He’s just been buying girls in blue.’
CHAPTER FIVE
1
The celebration banquet was all that Willoughby had promised it would be. It ended at about half past three. Willoughby went back to his office, Jerry to his rooms, and Barney resumed her exploration of London. Her brother Homer at the moment was talking to Vera Upshaw outside Flannery and Martin’s book shop in Sloane Square, where they had just met.
There was nothing coincidental in their meeting. One sees in it something of the inevitability which was such a feature of Greek tragedy. Sloane Square is not far from Chelsea Square, and any guest of Willoughby’s at 31 Chelsea Square would naturally go to Flannery and Martin when he wanted a book. Homer, who had read and admired Vera’s Morning’s At Seven, was anxious to obtain its successor, the recently published Daffodil Days. And as for Vera, the flat she shared with her mother was just around the corner and she looked in on Flannery and Martin a good deal to see if they had any copies of her brain child. Sometimes she came in the morning, sometimes in the evening. Today she had come in the afternoon, and she was still there when Homer reached journey’s end.
The gentlemanly young clerk who presided over the shop would gladly have seen her leave. Charmed at the outset of their relations by her radiant beauty, he had come to dread her visits. It seemed impossible, when she commented on the absence of copies of Daffodil Days, to convince her that he was just a Hey-you about the place and was not invited to join the discussion when Flannery and his partner Martin were deciding what books to stock. Mere quibbling his reasoning struck her as, and she mentioned this to him.
The clerk was mopping his forehead, wondering what could have induced him to sign on for his current post when there was such a brisk demand for strong young men to clean streets, and Vera had turned to run her eye over the shelf where belles-lettres of an older vintage were kept, to make sure that Daffodil Days had not slipped in there by mistake, when the door leading into the street opened, admitting a rush of warm air and something short, stout and American which seemed at first sight to be all horn-rimmed spectacles. She gave it no attention beyond a quick uninterested glance. Short stout Americans meant nothing to her, whether spectacled or with 20-20 vision. Only when, addressing the clerk, he uttered the astounding words ‘Have you a book called Daffodil Days by Vera Upshaw?’ did she whip round, her lips parted, her eyes wide, and her lovely body tingling as if some practical joker had run a powerful instalment of electricity through it. It is doubtful if a girl had been so thrilled since the one in the Indian Mutiny who heard the skirl of the bagpipes at the siege of Cawnpore.
Nor was the clerk unmoved. A suspicion was beginning to steal over him that his employers had passed up a good thing. Vera’s enthusiasm he could overlook as pure routine, but unless the man behind the spectacles was her uncle or father or something, this sudden call for copies of Daffodil Days might well be the start of a big popular demand; the first scattered raindrops, as it were, that herald the deluge. If, that is to say, one short stout person wanted to read Daffodil Days, it showed that it could be done, and who was to say that others would not want to do it?
He was shaken, but he tried to recover his poise. Regretfully confessing that the book was not at the moment in stock, he suggested to Homer that he should get it for him, an offer which Homer declined, saying that he would be leaving England on the following day. The clerk then put forward as possible substitutes My Life On The Links by Sandy McHoots (as told to Colin Jeffson) and Theatre Memories by Dame Flora Faye (as told to Reginald Tressilian), but no business resulted, and Homer was on the pavement outside the shop and about to head for Chelsea Square, when a voice said: ‘Excuse me’, and he turned and, having turned, stood rigid, like someone in a fairy story on whom a spell has been cast.
Homer’s life had been singularly free from beau
tiful girls. He did not go out in the evening very much, almost never to parties where such fauna abound, and during office hours a corporation lawyer’s chances of seeing anything in the Helen of Troy class are limited. The impact of Vera Upshaw was in consequence extremely powerful. He gaped at her like a spectacled goldfish, and it was she who opened the conversation. Her manner was brisk and free from diffidence. If a criticism must be made, it was, if anything, perhaps too firm and authoritative.’ Her public was not so large that she intended to let a potential reader get away.
‘I think I heard you asking for Daffodil Days,’ she said crisply.
Homer’s vocal cords were not in the best of shape, but he was able to reply huskily that this was so, adding that they hadn’t got it.
‘I know they hadn’t,’ said Vera with bitterness. ‘That’s the slipshod way book shops are run over here. Is it the same in America?’
A little surprised at her penetration in guessing his nationality, Homer replied that he had always found the New York book shops pretty good. He was, however, scarcely to be regarded as a normal customer, for he seldom read anything but legal tomes.
‘I am a corporation lawyer. My literature is mostly technical.’
‘Have you been in England long?’
‘A few days only. It is not, of course, my first visit. I have always been fond of London.’
Though I suppose your wife prefers Paris? Most American women do.’
‘I am not married.’
‘Oh. Well, what I was going to say was that I shall be very glad to give you a copy of Daffodil Days.’
‘No, no, really, I couldn’t think —’
‘I have several. I wrote it.’
Homer’s eyes widened to about the size of standard golf balls. He gasped a startled ‘Really?’
‘It is my second book. I had another out last year called —’
‘Morning’s At Seven,’ said Homer devoutly.
‘Don’t tell me you read it.’
‘I read it several times.
‘But it wasn’t published in America.’
‘An English friend sent it to me.’
‘And you really liked it?’
‘I thought it admirable.’
‘How very gratifying. And how strange.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You said you only read law books.’
‘Except when I find a Morning’s At Seven,’ said Homer, coming within an ace of adding ‘Dear lady’. ‘I make an exception in the case of charming, delightful, dainty works that make me feel as if I were sitting beside a rippling brook, listening to its silver music. It had what so few books have nowadays, charm.’
Well put, thought Homer, and Vera thought so, too. There had been a few reviews of Morning’s At Seven, but only in obscure provincial papers and only things like ‘will help to pass an idle hour’ and ‘not unreadable’. This was the real stuff.
‘You speak like a poet,’ she said, feeling for the first time that the aura of wealth that floated about him like some lovely scent was not his only claim to her esteem, and she bestowed on him one of those melting glances which hit a susceptible man like the kick of a mule.
‘In a small way I am,’ said Homer, framing the words with difficulty, for the effects of that look still lingered. ‘I write little verses in my spare time.’
‘Have they been published?’
‘Very occasionally.’
‘You must make a book of them.’
‘I don’t think I could quite aspire to that.’
‘Nonsense. You’re much too modest. And now I must ask who and where.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What name and what address. Who do I send the book to?’
‘Homer Pyle is the name, but —’
‘Of course. I remember. You said you were leaving England tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I am going to Brussels for the P.E.N. conference.’
‘Why, so am I.’
Once more Homer found it difficult to speak, and when he did, all he could manage was a weak ‘Really?’
‘So we shall be seeing something of each other. And about the book. I can give it to you now, if you will come round to where I live. It’s only a step, and I should like you to meet my mother. Her name will probably be familiar to you. Dame Flora Faye.’
2
A girl who has brought a strange man home to meet her mother, rather in the tentative spirit of a dog bringing a bone into a drawing-room, naturally seeks the earliest opportunity of learning the latter’s opinion of him. Vera, having seen Homer out at the end of his visit, returned to where Dame Flora Faye reclined in her arm chair, and Dame Flora looked up at her from its depths with an enquiring, ‘Well?’
‘Just what I was going to say to you,’ said Vera.
‘Meaning what did I think of Mr Pyle?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you, my poppet.’
Surprisingly in a woman who in the course of a long career had spread more nervous breakdowns among directors, leading men, supporting players and assistant stage managers than any other female star of her weight and age, Dame Flora’s vocal delivery was soft and gentle. She had never been one of those empresses of stormy emotion so popular at one time on the silent screen who raged and bellowed; she got her effects more subtly. One of her playwrights, speaking from the nursing home where he was recovering from mental exhaustion, had once described her as the vulture who cooed like a dove.
‘It depends,’ she continued, ‘on what aspect of him you have in mind. If you refer to his looks, I doubt if he will ever win a beauty contest, even a seaside one. On the other hand, he is an American corporation lawyer, and one of the first lessons we learn in life is that there is no such thing as an American corporation lawyer who does not wear hundred-dollar bills next his skin summer and winter. I should imagine that when Mr Pyle is called upon to act for a company in its suit against another company, his clients consider themselves lucky if they come out of it after paying his fee with enough to buy a frugal lunch next day. Give me another cup of tea, dearie, and pass me those little cakes with pink sugar on top.’
They’re fattening.’
‘Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening. Returning to your question, I think I know why you asked it. You did not fail to notice that you had made a marked impression on this hand across the sea. He couldn’t take his eyes off you, and I’m not surprised, because you’re the most beautiful thing on earth, my lamb. So you’re saying to yourself “Where do I go from here?”, and you naturally come to mother for advice. I could give it to you better if I knew how matters are between you and this ginger-headed pavement artist you’ve got engaged to. As I understand it, he has money coming to him, but it’s in trust and his trustee won’t give it up and you very prudently refuse to marry him till the deadlock melts, if that’s what deadlocks do. I may be thinking of ice packs. You’re in the position of a manager who has a show that’s a turkey at the box office, and he thinks “Shall I put up the fortnight’s notice or shall I carry on on the chance of business improving?” If he knows what’s good for him, he puts up the notice, and I advise you to do the same, my dream child.’
‘It isn’t quite like that, Mother. Gerald is getting his money today.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I told him what to do. I’ve been studying up the legal end of the thing. It’s too long to explain, but it all turns on the trust being terminable. It is terminable, so Mr Scrope won’t have a leg to stand on. Gerald was lunching with him today, so by now everything must be settled.’
‘I see. But even so, what on earth do you want with him when you can have this excellent corporation lawyer with about a hundred times as much? I wouldn’t call Mrs Homer Pyle a euphonious name, but I strongly urge you to take it on. I’m not asking you to love him, mind you. I nearly married for love when I was young and foolish, but I came out of
the ether in time and saw there was nothing in it. Mutual respect is what matters in marriage. Pyle respects you, doesn’t he? Of course he does. And don’t tell me you don’t respect someone who makes his sort of money. And you’ll be together in Brussels for I don’t know how long. And you get lovelier every day. And a man who writes little poems can’t have any sales resistance. Why, the thing’s in the bag. The scenario couldn’t read better if it had been turned out in Hollywood with six supervisors and fifteen writers working on it. Don’t wait, honeychile. Get on the phone and tell your French polisher it’s all off. I never could see what you saw in him in the first place.’
No daughter could have failed to be stirred by such admirable counsel coming from Mother who knew best, and Vera was plainly swayed. Nevertheless, she was dubious.
‘But how can I? I wouldn’t know what to say.’
Dame Flora smiled a gentle smile. Rising from her chair, she put an arm round her little girl and gave her a kiss, as she had done to a dozen daughters in a dozen productions since the march of time had forced her to play mothers.
‘Don’t worry your pretty head about that, my pet. I’ll do the ringing up. You say that you would be at a loss for words. I won’t. Words are the last thing I’m ever at a loss for. I know exactly how the scene should go. I tell him you think he’s weak, and you must have a strong man for a husband, because you need someone to guide you and make decisions for you. So-and-so I’ll say and so-and-so and so-and-so, and I’ll wind up by telling him you will always look on him as a dear, dear friend and will follow his career with considerable interest. Any questions?’
‘Oh, Mother!’ said Vera.
3
The policeman on the corner, watching Homer start on his journey back to Chelsea Square, probably debated with himself the advisability of weaving a circle round him thrice, his aspect being so plainly that of one who on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise. Only the fact of his wearing spectacles and having a hat on kept attention from being drawn to his flashing eyes and floating hair. He was, indeed, in as uplifted a mood as if he had just received a six-figure fee for negotiating a merger between a multi-million corporation and another multi-million corporation.
The Girl in Blue Page 4